High School Condensed

• Early college. BHSEC is unusual, but not entirely unique. Two other New York City public schools are working with a local college to allow students to complete two years of college in a five-year high school program, while high schools across the US are increasingly allowing students to take community-college classes.

But there has yet to emerge any consensus on what the purpose of high school really is - and what adolescents need to learn.

"It's reasonably easy to come up with standards for K-8 schools," says Rick Hess, assistant professor of government and education at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. "But in high school there's more fragmentation, more disagreement. For instance, do they all really need algebra and two languages?"

From about 1900 to 1950, many high schools still offered a fairly rigorous college-preparatory curriculum, with subjects like Latin, physics, and geometry viewed as staples.

But at the time, a much smaller percentage of Americans attended high school. Only since the 1950s have a majority of those eligible been in high school.

"On the one hand, this is an extraordinary success story," says Leslie Santee Siskin, associate professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Mass. "In 50 years we've turned high school from something only the elite went to, into something for every adolescent in America, and that's a remarkable thing."

And yet, she adds, "The question is: 'Now that they're all there, what can we do for them?' "

Botstein provided some of his own answers to these questions as he addressed the BHSEC students on their first day. "We want to focus on inquiry and critical thought rather than to spoon-feed you," he told them. "We want to give every single one of you the capacity to never be bored ..., to see the ordinary and change it ..., to discover what you think, why you think it, and to defend it."

To some, such goals may seem lofty but nebulous. For Botstein, helping high school students reach them "is probably the most important thing I've ever done in all my years as an educator."

Colonial US: Private and public grammar schools teach Latin, Greek, and occasionally Hebrew to prepare boys for college, the clergy, or public service. Typical courses include Cicero, Virgil, the Greek poets, and the New Testament.

1821: The first American high school is created - The English High School in Boston, offering a three-year course of study including navigation, algebra, philosophy, history, and bookkeeping to boys age 12 and older.

Pre-1865: There are still only about 300 high schools in the United States, mostly concentrated in the Northeast. About 2 percent of 17-year-olds have high school diplomas.

1890-1920: Total high school enrollment jumps from 200,000 to 2 million, although in 1900 the typical high school still has only two teachers.

1910-1930: The percentage of students studying Latin, Greek, algebra, geometry, and physics declines, while the percentage studying general science, home economics, bookkeeping, and typing increases.

1950: About half of 25- to 29-year-olds in the US have high school diplomas.

Early 1950s: Education researcher James Bryant Conant travels through the US, urging the creation of large comprehensive high schools to give students more choices.

1960s: President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program stresses the need to educate all children.

1975: The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires US public schools to educate students with disabilities.

1998: 85 percent of 25- to 29-year-olds in the US have high school diplomas.

E-mail marjorie@csmonitor.com.

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